We arrived in Khorog by Tajik (aka Tragic) Air from Dushanbe on June 5. In Soviet times this was the only scheduled airline route for which air crew received hazard pay!
KHOROG, TAJIKISTAN — I travelled last week to Khorog with two European Union policemen from Kabul to participate in the handover ceremony for our three, newly completed Border Crossing Point (BCP) facilities. Pablo Carrillo is a police officer from Spain who has been working with the International Police Coordination Board and the European Union Police Mission (EUPOL) in Afghanistan. Christian Tuschik is a German police officer who was one of the flyover trainers who trained our Afghan BCP officers last Fall, and is now on the EUPOL staff in Kabul.
Pablo and Christian arrived in Dushanbe on Tuesday morning from Kabul, having flown in on Kam Air — an airline which UNDP staff are not allowed to fly because the Wizard of Oz in New York has decreed that a 45 minute flight on Kam Air is unsafe. Instead, we are required to travel by road, in unarmoured Toyota trucks, without weapons, body armour or escorts, through bandit country for 15 hours. Even accounting for an abysmal safety record on a chosen airline, the statistical risk of flying pales in comparison to the statistical risk of driving… anywhere. And on Afghan roads, competing with Afghan drivers, even more so. Then, of course, there are those pesky insurgents. But, I digress…
We flew out Thursday morning on Tragic Air, the national airline of Tajikistan in a mini-bus with wings. All of the seats were sold and it was standing-room only. I’m not kidding. The “flight attendant” guy stood in the aisle, chatting with the flight crew the whole time as there was nowhere for him to sit.
The aircraft was about a million years old, but had the feel and look of an old farm machine. It was a work horse and I felt pretty confident in its ability to get the job done.
In typical Tragic Air fashion, we arrived at the airport an hour early and stood outside the brand new domestic terminal in the boiling sunshine. The terminal looked beautiful. Shiny. New. Clean. Apparently, they keep it clean by not allowing anyone inside.
When we were finally allowed to enter, we checked in at the counter and they weighed our bags. After weigh-in, they gave us a tag to put on our checked luggage (I had one piece since I travelled with my First-Aid and survival kits for the road trip back) and we went through security. Security was a walk-through magnetometer (metal detector) archway, which was turned off, followed by a guy with a table and a handheld metal detector. He waved it over my checked and carryon bags and it screamed constantly.
“Metallic?” he asked?
“Yes,” I answered.
He zeroed in on a compartment in my checked bag and asked again, “metallic?”
“I guess so,” I answered, trying to recall what was in that particular pocket. When in doubt, create a diversion.
“I have a computer in this bag,” I offered, pointing to the other bag.
“Metallic?” he asked, running the handheld wand over my carry-on.
“Yes, see…” I said, unzipping the pouch and showing him my travel chargers.
“OK!” he said, waving me through.
I dropped the checked luggage in the corner with a small but growing pile of other bags and presented my papers to yet another official of some sort who looked, flipped, grunted and handed them back.
A short while later, we were ushered out to the bus for the ride to our plane. Once everyone was on the bus and the doors were closed, the doors were open and everyone was kicked off the bus. Back into the terminal. Back to our checked luggage. It seems we are the baggage crew. Picked up my checked bag and carried it back out to the bus for the ride to the plane.
It was comforting to note that the plane was so large not more than two of them would have fit inside the bus.
When we arrived at the plane, it was locked. All alone. No crew. No pre-flight. Nobody. Even the harsh, task-mistress Tragic Air ground agent who had screamed at everyone to go carry their own bags looked unsure of what to do next.
After a few minutes of people milling around the plane, the “flight attendant” dude wandered over from their operations (?) shack and unlocked the back door of the plane. He stood at the top of the stairs and we each climbed up with our own bags and stowed them in the baggage rack, then found a place to sit.
Inside, it was standing room only (literally) in the 60+ degree Celsius cabin.
Once everyone was aboard, a couple of pilots came aboard and pulled their way through the crowd to the flight deck and sat down. The flight attendant guy pulled up the stairs, and locked the clamshell doors closed behind us. Then it got hot.
Really hot.
Really, really hot.
Maybe 55 to 60 degrees hot. In a tiny steel oven. In the baking sun. With no air circulation whatsoever. 20 people crammed into the space of a Chrysler mini-van.
It took ten minutes to run through the pre-flight checklist in the cockpit before they could crank up the engines and get some air flowing through the cabin. It felt like a lifetime. I sweated off almost a full kilo. Being an international jet-setter is sooo much fun.
When we finally got moving, we were number one for take off. Then again, at Dushanbe International, every plane is number one. We turned onto the runway, the pilots pushed the throttles forward and we rotated in about 100 meters and were up into the air. Not bad.
The air route from Dushanbe to Khorog is a beautiful one. Plane and helicopter trips along this route are frequently cancelled for no apparent reason. I now understand the reason. No matter if the sky is brilliant blue in Dushanbe. No matter if the sky is cloudless in Khorog. If there’s a chance there will be a cloud in the mountains, the planes don’t fly. I am told that the this route is the only scheduled airline route in the former Soviet Union where pilots were paid hazard pay.
Objects in window are closer than they appear. The rock face in the distance is about 20 metres from the wingtip.
The aircraft is a twin-engine turboprop aircraft without cabin pressurization and with a service ceiling well below the height of the peaks in the mountain ranges that separate Dushanbe from Khorog. As a result, the route is not so much over the mountains as it is between the mountains. In two or three locations, the distance between mountain peaks on either side of the aircraft is impressively small. In one place, there was maybe three wing-spans distance. Looking out the window on my side of the aircraft, the wing tip was at most 10 meters from the cliff face. Impressive.
If there had been a cloud obscuring that pass, we would have had to turn back. If we had suffered a power failure, there was nowhere to land that wasn’t a vertical face.
It was one of the most beautiful one hour flights I’ve ever taken.
The VIPs flew by Tajik Military Mi-8 helicopter, not by Tajik Air. I’m not sure who had the safer flight…
There goes my ride! The aircraft returned to Dushanbe during the middle of the handover ceremony. No matter… We were planning to return by road (two day trip) anyways… But, that’s in Part II.